Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 39, Pages 14796-14801Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804757105
Keywords
fire ecology; human behavioral ecology; hunter-gatherers; resource management
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS-0127681, BCS-0314406]
- Leakey Foundation
- Stanford University
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0850664] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a resource management strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. We combine ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Anthropogenic landscapes contain a greater diversity of successional stages than landscapes under a lightning fire regime, and differences are of scale, not of kind. Landscape scale is directly linked to foraging for small, burrowed prey (monitor lizards), which is a specialty of Aboriginal women. The maintenance of. small-scale habitat mosaics increases small-animal hunting productivity. These results have implications for understanding the unique biodiversity of the Australian continent, through time and space. In particular, anthropogenic influences on the habitat structure of paleolandscapes are likely to be spatially localized and linked to less mobile, broad-spectrum foraging economies.
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